Cayo: High cost, poor job prospects deter students from college

“What will it take” ask the CEOs of some of Canada’s top companies, “to convince policy-makers and the public that education is an investment in our economic future and not merely a social cost?”

It’s a good question. And the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, as was reported on Tuesday by my colleague Darah Hansen, seems committed to finding some answers.

As Hansen’s story notes, the CEO issued a new report chronicling a dismally low level of interest in post-secondary education that will prepare young Canadians for careers in science, technology or math. Just one example — in China, more than one in three newly granted university degrees are in engineering fields; in Canada it’s just one in 10.

Yet if Canada is to maintain its traditional economic strength in any field other than, perhaps, resource harvesting, it will have to maintain its traditional edge over much of the world when it comes to innovation and technology.

The CEOs call for a national roundtable to probe the issue through the eyes of the federal, provincial and territorial governments, the private sector, not-for-profit organizations and citizens.

I’d add to this group not only students but also other young Canadians — all those would-be, should-be and could-be students who could be boosting the number of needed graduates. Because, even though the report notes overall university and college attendance in non-technical disciplines is relatively high here compared with other developed countries, I don’t think it’s wise to discount the combination of high cost and poor employment prospects that is discouraging young Canadians from pursuing advanced education to acquire specialized skills they may never get to use.

On the cost side, B.C. is one of the more expensive provinces in which to pursue higher learning. Tuitions, averaging well over $5,000 a year, have soared 400 per cent, or 10 times faster than inflation, since 1991, and other costs — books, transportation, accommodation and the like — are up as well.

And job prospects?

Well, the Economist noted a couple of years ago that the number of young Canadian graduates who were working at low-skill level jobs was about 37 per cent. This trails only Spain in a ranking of 14 OECD countries.

And those numbers don’t look like a short-term anomaly during a difficult year. Full-time employment for young Canadians has been trending downward, from about 65 per cent to about 45, for nearly four decades in a series of lurches — sharp drops during recessions followed by modest improvements during the better years between.

This gloomy job picture is complicated by uncertainty over the future. While the mid- to long-term job forecasts for Canada and B.C. are relatively bright with so many baby boomers poised to retire soon, the tendency in the past has been for those who don’t find entry-level jobs in their field fairly shortly after graduation to be beat out by more recent grads when opportunities do eventually open up. Those who’ve been trained in the fast-changing fields of science and technology may feel particularly vulnerable.

Meanwhile, the average debt load for university graduates is nearly $27,000 and climbing.

If the CEOs are interested in intelligent investment in higher education, they’ll have to grapple with these problems.

Lower tuition is a frequent suggestion, but I’m not sure it will provide the most bang for the public’s buck. Since university students disproportionately come from economically privileged backgrounds, it would increase the subsidy to those who don’t need it and are already over-represented in the halls of higher learning.

Well-targeted grants or scholarships, if they’re available to those who maintain educational standards and need the help, make more sense to me.

So would a well-designed, income-contingent loan program, could be built on the principle that the benefits of education are shared by both individual students and society at large.

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